Hitomi Takahashi

Hitomi Takahashi (高橋瞳) was born on April 8, 1989. Because of her abnormally large eyes, her parents named her "Hitomi", which means "pupil/eye" in Japanese. By the influence of her father, she grew up listening to his favorite music, which was classic rock like Eric Clapton and the Beatles. In 2002, she entered junior-high school. Once entering middle school, Hitomi joined the school softball team and expressed an interest in becoming an artist's backup dancer. So, every morning she would practice dancing before she went to Kendo (Japanese sword fighting) practice. (She obtained the first level degree in Kendo). Every night after school Hitomi and her friends would gather together and street dance. In the year of 2003, while she was at dance practice, Hitomi was encouraged to try to sing at a local popularity event. Hitomi disliked singing karaoke in front of such a large crowd, but her friends greatly encouraged her to sing, and from that time on the desire to become a singer awoke in her. During her second year in junior-high school, in the middle of the summer of 2003, Hitomi applied for the Sony Music Auditions. For the auditions, she recorded the rock song "Ukifune" by the band GO!GO!7188, but because the deadline was drawing near, she sent in the tape without listening to it. Also, because a change of interest, Hitomi moved from singing dance music to singing rock music. In 2004, Hitomi was selected as finalist for the Sony Music SD audition (Vo-che3), from around 20,000 others. She was worried that because of her height (147 cm), she would be overlooked, but her powerful voice attracted the attention of people as she sang live. At the end of 2004, She was chosen to sing the theme song for "Gundam SEED DESTINY" and recording began at the end of the year. In 2005, she was in the middle of high school entrance exams as the title for her 1st single "Bokutachi no Yukue" was announced. When the 30 second preview of the song started airing on the Gundam SEED DESTINY website, traffic increased so much that access to the site became unavailable for a short time. Hitomi soon entered senior high school, and started her first radio personality on Date fm (FM Sendai) called "Takahashi Hitomi ~Sound D・N・A~". On April 13, 2005 Hitomi released her debut single "Bokutachi no Yukue." For its first week on the charts, the single was #1; she was the 2nd female to have had a debut single reach #1 and the third solo artist to have a debut single reach #1. The single ended up selling well over 100,000 copies. On August 12, 2005 Hitomi released her 2nd single "evergreen." It placed #22 for its first week on the charts, and has sold a little less than 30,000 copies. Later on in the year, rumors started to spread that Hitomi would be releasing her 3rd single on October 12, 2005, and that it would be the theme song for the anime BLOOD+. Her official site never confirmed this rumor, but did confirm that she would be singing the theme song for the new anime BLOOD+. Not too long after the rumors, Hitomi's site updated with news revealing that her 3rd single would be titled "Aozora no NAMIDA", and this would be the single that would have the BLOOD+ theme song on it. For its first week on the charts, "Aozora no NAMIDA" placed #8 with 44,629 copies sold. This was a huge leap from her past single "evergreen". Less than two weeks after Hitomi's 3rd single "Aozora no NAMIDA" was released, the well-known online store, CDJapan, announced that Hitomi would be releasing her first album on February 1, 2006. Her site soon updated, and the album was officially titled "sympathy", but was pushed back to the later date of March 1, 2006. The album is to come in two formats, CD only and CD+DVD (limited), and is to contain 12 tracks total, 7 of them being previously unreleased songs.